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Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction. Civil Resistance and Contentious Space in Hong Kong -- 1 From Political Acquiescence to Civil Disobedience: Hong Kong's Road to Occupation -- 2. Spontaneity and Civil Resistance: A Counter Frame of the Umbrella Movement -- 3. Rude Awakening: New Participants and the Umbrella Movement -- 4. Perceived Outcomes and Willingness to Retreat among Umbrella Movement Participants -- 5. Praxis of Cultivating Civic Spontaneity: Aesthetic Intervention in the Umbrella Movement -- 6. Creating a Textual Public Space: Slogans and Texts from the Umbrella Movement -- 7. From Repression to Attrition: State Responses towards the Umbrella Movement -- 8. Protesters and Tactical Escalation -- 9. Mass Support for the Umbrella Movement -- 10. Correlates of Public Attitudes toward the Umbrella Movement -- 11. The Power of Sunflower: The Origin and the Impact of Taiwan's Protest against Free Trade with China -- 12. The Mirror Image: How does Macao Society read Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement? -- 13. Hong Kong Now, Shanghai Then -- Appendix .The Umbrella Movement—Chronology of Major Events -- Index

Reviewing the extant literature on China's public sphere from the perspective of 20th-century history and social science, this introductory essay argues for the continued relevance of studying the publications and public practices associated with knowledge communities. By steering away from normative definitions and by envisaging publicness as a process, a connection can be explored between social discourses and political practices in China. Discursive communities, based on shared identity or sociability, may appear marginal, but at key moments they can play a unique role in modifying the dynamics of political events. (China Q/GIGA)

United front work has long been an important tool through which the Chinese Communist Party exercises political influence in Hong Kong. While existing works have revealed the history, actors, and impact of united front work in this semiautonomous city, few studies have focused on its changing structure and objectives in the post-handover period. Using publicly available reports and an original event dataset, we show that united front work has involved a steady organizational proliferation of social organizations coupled with their increasingly frequent interaction with the mainland authorities and the Hong Kong government. We argue that united front work has become more decentralized and multilayered in its structure and that its objective has been shifting from elite co-optation to proactive countermobilization against pro-democracy threats. Our findings indicate that state power in post-handover Hong Kong does not solely belong to governmental institutions; it is increasingly exercised through an extensive network comprising multiple state and social actors.

Collective memory shapes collective identity in social movements, yet the cultural process of transforming collective memory into collective identity and actions is anything but linear. While preserving an established historical narrative can maintain movement solidarity, this process is actively contested by multiple actors, which may weaken solidarity and disrupt mobilization. Why does the memory process facilitate collective identity building at one point but not another? What accounts for its success and failure in mobilizing through memories? This article studies the three-decade commemoration of the 1989 Tiananmen protests in Hong Kong to unpack the memory making in movements. We argue that collective-identity building is shaped by the interaction between the repository of memories and the repertoires expressing them. Although the performative repertoire of the vigil has long bestowed moral power to memories of the Tiananmen crackdown, this repertoire is contested by competing repertoires, even though the memory itself is not disputed. Our findings highlight the performative and filtering role of repertoires in reproducing collective memory. They also reveal a dynamic and nuanced relationship between collective memory and identity, especially the mediating factors at work.

Protest activists employ various strategies to challenge regimes, and regimes deploy multifaceted tactics to respond to such challenges. Existing studies on regime protest responses focus on repression and concession, but little attention is devoted to toleration, which is often regarded as government inaction. Drawing on primary sources and interviews, this article analyses regime responses to Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement to expand the conceptualisation of toleration. First, it demonstrates that regimes adapt multiple strategies to protesters' reactions rather than adhering to a single response. Second, it shows that toleration, other than ignoring protests, entails proactive tactics that we summarise as attrition. While 'tolerating' street occupation, the regime sought to eliminate political opportunities by maintaining elite cohesion, increase participation costs by mobilising countermovements and bolster legitimacy by leveraging the court as a revered institution. This new conceptual distinction thus captures regime innovation in counteracting protests and broadens the typology of regime responses.

AbstractUnderstanding the formation of and changes in citizens' extreme views on complex public policies is an important task in our increasingly polarized world. Behavioral sciences offer insights on cognitive processes and potential mechanisms to mitigate extremity in policy preferences and develop more realistic models that underprint political attitudes. About a decade ago, Fernbach et al. (2013) offered a simple cognitive intervention to reduce political extremism: Confront people with their lack of procedural policy knowledge such that their overestimation of knowledge is shattered. We conducted three high‐value replications and extensions to examine the applicability of Fernbach's proposed theory among a sample of 5,139 citizens in postconflict Hong Kong. Our results suggest the opposite: Positional extremity is higher when citizens articulate their understanding of policy. Our study, which is larger in scale, draws on different time periods and extended interventions and examines more controversial policy issues has epistemological and cognitive implications for future research on the political psychology of extremism.

Recent literature has underscored the power of digital activism, but few studies have symmetrically examined its impact beyond domestic audiences and among illiberal regimes. The co-occurrence of mass protests in East and Southeast Asia in 2019–2021, when protesters called for help from international communities, offers a valuable opportunity to test the power of digital media. This study uses a data set of 154 million Twitter posts and a time-series model to contrast sets of collective action metrics and connective action metrics with a novel dependent variable—foreign politicians' responses. We then analyze the directional, intensity, and time-lagged effects of the relevant cue-taking processes. We find that the new metrics are more potent in predicting responses from foreign politicians. Agency- and network-centered metrics also outperform number- and intensity-oriented metrics across the three cases. These findings have implications for the roles of opinion leadership and engagement networks in digital activism.